Capacity Building Modules for Women SHGs to Promote Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Since independence, India is continuously fighting against poverty and gender inequality. Transitioning from the top-down approach to bottom-up approach, India came up with Self Help Groups (SHGs) model that proved to be effective in dealing with poverty and ensuring women empowerment. However, this model had certain drawbacks that got refined over time and finally it was extended to promote entrepreneurship. In this refined approach, the SHGs showing positive result were encouraged to take up entrepreneurial activities. Although everything looked effective there were several pitfalls in it. This research presents one such major pitfalls wherein the women SHGs from North Gujarat were encouraged to take up entrepreneurial activities without suitable training. This resulted in several internal issues among the SHG members leading to poor performances. Thus, to identify the root cause of degraded performance, research was conducted using a casebased research framework. The results reveal that encouraging entrepreneurship among women SHGs without proper planning has no relevance towards eliminating poverty or ensuring women empowerment. In fact, the outcome can be negatively affecting the entire group dynamics. Moreover, the results will also help in ensuring policy level changes in SHG based entrepreneurship model.